TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie’s budget address Tuesday showed over 32 minutes how much the George Washington Bridge scandal has spent down his political capital.

Political analysts said the Republican governor’s sagging poll numbers forced him to shy away from following through on proposing to skip a pension payment or demanding that Democrats comply with a tax cut, things he hinted at a month ago.

There was a 12-minute library-silent span where Christie received no applause as he made the case for a new round of pension system overhauls. But he didn’t say what the fixes should be — marking one of the few times as governor that Christie left an audience with more questions than solutions.

“It’s very rare he doesn’t connect with an audience,” said Patrick Murray, head of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “This audience sat there like an oil painting.”

A Monmouth University/Asbury Park Press poll released this week showed Christie’s approval ratings have dipped 15 points since the release of emails showed connections from the governor’s advisers to the GWB political scandal.

Christie still has an approval rating of 50 percent, but it was 70 percent a year ago.

“The scandal has taken a lot of wind out of his sails,” said Ross Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University. “There are so many unresolved questions and there is a widespread feeling more shoes will drop. It creates a circumstance that the Christie boldness he’s known for is not called for.”

“I think the Christie team is racing under a yellow flag now,” Murray said. “They’re trying to hold their position. That’s the most they can hope for. This was one of the most low-key speeches he’s ever given.”

Democrats said based on past history with Christie they were braced for a fight. Instead, they found little to quibble with, except to say that they wouldn’t go along if Christie wants public employees to make pension givebacks.

Assemblyman Louis Greenwald, D-Camden, said he liked the new Christie. “It was conciliatory and it was certainly an effort to work together,” he said.

But the chief adversary for the Christie team — Assemblyman John Wisniewski, D-Middlesex, co-chairman of the joint legislative panel investigating the GWB lane closures — said Christie “is in a different mode, not as bold as he has been in the past.”

“Today we did not see the same governor who delivered last year’s budget address. There was a remarkable lack of specificity on a lot of the issues he talked about. He devoted probably half of his speech to our pension and benefits issue, which is not a new issue for anyone in this chamber. If the governor has a specific proposal on how to address those costs, now would have been the time.”

“I couldn’t begin to get inside his head but clearly a speech that did not have any specifics is troubling when talking about the scope and size of the problems we have in this state,” Wisniewski said.